The scale and possible range of political material allegedly uploaded onto Facebook by operatives was revealed.
The networking giant has estimated that approximately 80,000 articles uploaded and were produced before and following the divisive 2016 US presidential election which watched Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton.
This means that the articles, which focused on social and political problems, could have been seen by as many as 126 million US Facebook users.
The revelation came before a Senate hearing where Google Facebook and Twitter will be asked to detail their quotes to attempt to affect the results of the vote.
The Russian government has denied all allegations that sway and it sanctioned the use of social media to try US taxpayers.
The statement came on precisely the same day that Google released a statement saying that Russian YouTube users had uploaded over 1,000 political movies on 18 different channels. Twitter has also suspended 2,752 accounts it has monitored back to the online research Agency.
Substantial existence
The 80,000 Facebook posts were seen directly by 29 million American Facebook users. Facebook believes that a company with links made these posts to the government. The articles were pushed out to millions more people through enjoys, shares and remarks.
A article counts as having ‘reached’ an individual when it’s shown on the Facebook News Feed though they may not end up reading it.
Thus the estimate that the content might have been viewed up to 126 million users, and the difficulty in trying to accurately determine how much influence it really had on voters.
There are also issues with the fact that, based on Facebook’s own rules, many of the posts did not technically do anything wrong. In a blog post Facebook’s Elliot Schrage said that many of the deleted articles did not violate the organization’s content policies. They had been deleted due because their nationality had not been said by the posters to inauthenticity.
The company has also deleted 170 accounts, which had posted an parts of content.
